Known as a sophisticated phenomenon in civil engineering problems, soil structure interaction has been under deep investigations in the field of Geotechnics. On the other hand, advent of powerful computers has led to development of numerous numerical methods to deal with this phenomenon, resulting in a wide variety of methods trying to simulate the behavior of the soil stratum. This survey studies two common approaches to model the soil’s behavior in a system consisting of a structure with two degrees of freedom, representing a two-storey frame structure made of steel, with the column resting on a pile embedded into sand in laboratory scale. The effect of soil simulation technique on the dynamic behavior of the structure is of major interest in the study. Utilized modeling approaches are the so-called Holistic method, and substitution of soil with respective impedance functions.

The aim of this study is to show an application of model robustness measures for soilstructure interaction (henceforth written as SSI) models. Model robustness defines a measure for the ability of a model to provide useful model answers for input parameters which typically have a wide range in geotechnical engineering. The calculation of SSI is a major problem in geotechnical engineering. Several different models exist for the estimation of SSI. These can be separated into analytical, semi-analytical and numerical methods. This paper focuses on the numerical models of SSI specific macro-element type models and more advanced finite element method models using contact description as continuum or interface elements. A brief description of the models used is given in the paper. Following this description, the applied SSI problem is introduced. The observed event is a static loaded shallow foundation with an inclined load. The different partial models to consider the SSI effects are assessed using different robustness measures during numerical application. The paper shows the investigation of the capability to use these measures for the assessment of the model quality of SSI partial models. A variance based robustness and a mathematical robustness approaches are applied. These different robustness measures are used in a framework which allows also the investigation of computational time consuming models. Finally the result shows that the concept of using robustness approaches combined with other model–quality indicators (e.g. model sensitivity or model reliability) can lead to unique model–quality assessment for SSI models.